Across the developed world, employment has declined in middle-wage `routine’ jobs and increased strongly in jobs requiring a degree. Recent evidence from the U.S. and Sweden indicates this change is associated with an increase in the demand for jobs requiring social skills. Over the last 30 years the UK labour market has witnessed a well-documented increase in the supply of graduates while the occupational structure has shifted towards managerial jobs. However, there is no strong evidence as yet that these changes have benefitted workers with higher social abilities.
In this project we will investigate the labour market returns to social skills in the context of the UK. Thanks to the availability of long-running cohort studies, the UK offers an opportunity to examine unique data on individual’s characteristics, such as cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical abilities. ALSPAC is particularly suitable to our purposes as it also collects genetic information which can be used to carry out a Mendelian randomization research design to obtain causal estimates of the impact of social skills on wages or employment.
The changing labour market is at the centre of some of the most important social policy debates worldwide, especially those focused on the effect of artificial intelligence on the demand for different types of skills. We will contribute to these debates by providing novel evidence of the relationship between different types of skills and labour market outcomes.